There are a lot of books out there on Warren Buffett but, if the Oracle of Omaha had to choose his favorite, he would say Lawrence Cunningham's "The Essays of Warren Buffett."
It's "the most representative book on my views," Buffett said at the 2000 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, "because he essentially has taken my words and rearranged them."
In the book, Cunningham arranges Buffett's letters to shareholders, which explain his basic principles on investing and business, by theme. That organizational scheme, says Buffett, "makes it a lot easier to read than trying to go through year after year."
Cunningham, a professor at George Washington University, released the original edition in 1995 but the fourth and most recent edition, published in 2015, incorporates fresh material, including Buffett's 50th anniversary retrospective.
While Buffett says that this book is most representative of his investing philosophy, he also points out that all of his original letters to shareholders over the past few decades are available online and he recommends the original source material. "It's probably a bias I have, but I like to think that I laid out those views better than somebody who's rewriting them, but I'll let you make that decision."
As for Buffett's favorite read that's not specifically about him, that would be "Business Adventures," a 1969 collection of New Yorker articles by John Brooks.
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